Every day ‘we’ here at Radio JRB hope that the timing of the next mixtape will coincide with something topical to write about for the ‘text’ that accompanies it. But what happens when the real world is just one huge, topical storm?
Best to run a bath if you have the water for it, turn off the lights if they’re working, head back to bed and hope that everything will be fine in the morning. Alternatively you can go full Howard Beale; get mad as hell, swear that you’re not going to take it anymore and devote the rest of your life to pounding the streets, raising your fists, shouting slogans at the glass facades of Sandton skyscrapers and spitting at your besuited enemies.
Whichever path you choose, best of luck to you, take your headphones and let this ‘spring has sprung’ edition of Radio JRB be the guide, if not of your conscience, then at least your ears.
In this edition we travel from the rural hinterland of the KwaZulu-Natal to the muggy climes of Réunion Island, the wail-inducing mountains of Catalonia, the hopeful madness of Austin, cold but defiant Chicago, polyphonic Brazil, restlessly resilient Jamaica, sleazy seventies Lower East Side New York and the communes of anarchist post-World War II Germany—in search of aural ports that have always helped to offer brief shelter in the most topical of storms past and present.
Climb aboard, bon voyage and see you in the hell of a climate-change induced summer inferno soon.
- Tymon Smith is a member of The JRB Editorial Advisory Panel, and a freelance journalist who writes about the arts and South African history. Previously the literary editor of the Sunday Times, he is the recipient of a silver Standard Banks Arts Journalist of the Year Award for feature writing. He was the head researcher for the interactive DVD Between Life and Death: Stories from John Vorster Square, and is working on a book about the Johannesburg police station.
